Two loathesome creatures in this week's New Yorker fiction offering

The New Yorker returns this week to publishing what is obviously an excerpt from a soon-to-be-released novel, this time the xcerpt is called Expectations, by John Lanchester, a British writer - and I think this excerpt serves his cause well, as it's very readable, funny, a skewering of a British currency trader waiting for his annual xmas bonus and figuring out how he can spend the expected money, all the while his wife is plotting to leave him, at least temporarily, to see if he can fend for himself with the two kids. Well, you can certainly hear the echos of Tom Wolfe and, perhaps, of Kramer v. Kramer. What makes this Lanchester piece distinctive, however, is that the two characters are totally despicable and loathsome creatures - selfish, vulgar, entitled. Okay, it's kinds fun to read about them for a few pages - but a whole book? I don't know. He's picked a very easy target and smashed it to smithereens. And who doesn't enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the undeserving super-rich make a total mess of their privileged lives? Of course in a novel (or a movie) characters have the space to change, evolve - Kramer v Kramer, and Bonfire of the Vanities, q.v. - but not in short pieces such as this excerpt, which leads me to think that Lanchester's novel may be better, more palatable, than what we're reading in TNYer, at least it has a chance of turning these two people into characters we might care about, but please don't let it be another one of those male-fantasy stories in which the dad ends up outperforming the mom at parenthood.